Break-Even Calculator
Enter your fixed costs for a period, your price, and your true variable cost per unit — see exactly how many units you need to sell to break even, and what that means per operating day, not just a raw number. Live, on the same shared formula engine as every other calculator here.
Costs & Price
Tell us your fixed costs for a period, and what you charge versus what each unit actually costs you.
Want the full picture? Try the Ultimate Calculator — combines this with packaging, labor, fees, and overhead in one session.
How this is calculated ▸
price − variable cost per unit. Break-even units =
fixed costs ÷ contribution margin per unit, rounded up to a whole unit. Break-even
revenue = break-even units × price. Formula engine version .
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How to use the result
Break-even units is the number of sales it takes, over the period your fixed costs cover, before you've earned back everything you spent just to keep the doors open — rent, insurance, loan payments, salaried staff — regardless of how much you sell. Every sale past that point is where actual profit starts. The raw total is useful, but per operating day is what turns it into something you can act on: instead of "sell 219 units this week," it's "sell about 44 a day" — a number you can actually check yourself against at the end of a shift.
Your variable cost per unit needs to be your true cost — ingredients, packaging, and labor together — not just ingredients alone. Build that number from the Recipe Cost Calculator or Cost Per Serving Calculator, plus the Packaging Cost Calculator and Labor Cost Calculator if those aren't already folded in — an incomplete variable cost understates how many units you actually need to sell.
How this calculator works
Every sale covers its own variable cost first — the ingredients, packaging, and labor that went into that specific unit. What's left over after that is the contribution margin: the amount each sale contributes toward paying off fixed costs. Divide total fixed costs by that per-unit contribution, and you get exactly how many sales it takes to cover them — rounded up to a whole unit, since you can't sell a fraction of one. Once you've covered break-even, every additional sale's contribution margin becomes straight profit, since fixed costs are already paid for the period.
Worked example
The example loaded above: a food truck with $1,200 in weekly fixed costs, selling a $9.00 item that costs $3.50 in ingredients, packaging, and labor combined, open 5 days a week.
- Contribution margin per unit: $9.00 − $3.50 = $5.50
- Break-even units: $1,200 ÷ $5.50 = 218.2, rounded up to 219 units
- Per operating day: 219 ÷ 5 = about 43.8 units a day
- Break-even revenue: 219 × $9.00 = $1,971.00
Notice that 61% of each $9.00 sale (the $5.50 contribution margin) goes toward covering fixed costs until break-even is reached — only 39% is tied up in the unit's own variable cost. A thinner contribution margin on the same $1,200 in fixed costs would push the break-even count up fast: at a $2.00 margin instead of $5.50, the same fixed costs would need 600 units to break even, not 219.
Common mistakes
- Using an incomplete variable cost. Ingredients alone isn't your true variable cost — leaving out packaging or labor makes your contribution margin look bigger than it really is, which understates how many units you actually need to sell.
- Mismatching the fixed-cost period and operating days. Weekly fixed costs need weekly operating days (typically up to 7), not a monthly day count — mixing periods produces a meaningless per-day number.
- Treating break-even as the goal. Break-even means you've covered costs, not that you've made money — it's the floor, not the target.
- Forgetting fixed costs change over time. A new loan payment, a rent increase, or a new hire changes fixed costs — recheck this number rather than reusing an old one indefinitely.